Tattoo of my unborn son's name

[la vitta mia]

I m gonna be father in a few days and I wanna tatoo his name Tomás Joaquín.

Can anyone translate it into chinese? Thank you very much. Muchas gracias.

[Hofmann]

Joaquín (lifted by Yahweh)

Tomás (twin)

揭孿

[Lugubert]

But first, you should know that names can't be "translated" from any language into any other one. Please please take some time to search this and other sites (like http://www.hanzismatter.com) before deciding something that will be a permanent proof that you don't know the first thing about languages.

[imron]

Also, have a read of this and this to familiarize yourself with the issues involved in converting non-Chinese names into Chinese characters.

[AlecO]

Are you sure you want that? If you're not Chinese, your son's not Chinese and the name's not Chinese, where's the link? If you read some of the links suggested above you'll realise it won't be an accurate 'translation' or 'transliteration' of your son's name, it'll just be some characters vaguely related by sound or meaning.

Chinese isn't some mystical language inherited from the gods. It's just another language which people use to talk about toilet problems and bitch about colleagues.

[BrandeX]

Unfortunately, is seems many people in the world still consider China as a place where magic is a real part of daily life, and everyone still lives like ancient times, training their kungfu and magic fireball shooting power or whatever daily.

[jbradfor]

Or maybe he just thinks that Chinese characters look cool? You're jumping to conclusions that his liking for Chinese characters has anything to do with China as a country.

[Lugubert]

Anyway, apart from all the hilarious mistakes posted at hanzismatter, my favourite anecdote goes like,

A girl dined at a Chinese place, and took a liking to some menu characters. She copied them, and knitted a sweater featuring them. After a while, a kind colleague told her that they meant "This dish is cheap but tasty".

[skillphiliac]

Please, be absolutely sure about whether you want to do this or no. I am browsing ratemyink's "Chinese/Asian" section on a regular basis and believe me, it makes me wonder. So many strange tattoos, so... well, uninspired. Of course, it is adorable you want to carry your son's name on your body, but there just is more to it. I don't condemn people having Hanzi tattoed on their bodies, au contraire, I know a lot having done so and some even look pretty distinguishable from normal Chinese writing (considering what we call "art" or "style"), words derrived from "western" languages don't have to be ugly or unfitting either. But what I really do not like, or, at least frown upon, is the fact that one person after another is casually going to his or her favourite parlor, briefly having a look at an assortment of clichée characters only having a crude (if at all!) translation underneath them, and deciding on one or several of those merely by the looks of respective "pictures". They don't know the least about what they have tattoed, about whether it is correctly done... they can't even say what language it is they have one or more word from, written on their foreheads. Phrases and dialogues like "This is a Japanese letter", "Those are Chinese letters forming my wife's name", "These? They are Chinese Kanji! They mean 'Great Big Star Floating Along The Edge Of The Endless Universe And Beyond Oh Dear God Help Me This Is A Long Long Description I Have Inked Right Above My Beloved Buttcheeks Of Wrath'! - Those two "Chinese Kanji" mean all that stuff?" I have experienced, and I grow tired of them.

So please, for both your sake and the sake of others (unless of course you want to contribute to hanzismatter, at least we will profit of your possible mistakes), get to know the language, or the means by which it works, a bit. Ask for guidance, know how it should look etc. Nothing wrong with getting to understand things you seem to be remotely interested in anyways.

[BrandeX]

After writing that post, the OP never came back to the forum, so perhaps he changed his mind.

[WuHao]

托马斯 = Tomás

Joaquín , I don't know how to speak it.